


Hunting

by poisontaster



Series: Light 'Verse [9]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Case Fic, Developing Relationship, F/M, Future Fic, Harm to Children, Infidelity, M/M, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-11
Updated: 2015-12-11
Packaged: 2018-05-06 05:21:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5404553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A vision sends Sam & Dean (& Dean's kids) on a case together for the first time in years.  It's a bigger hunt than they realize. Takes place between "Come" and "If it Isn't Love."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hunting

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nu_breed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nu_breed/gifts).



Dean sleeps heavier than he used to, but certain noises still cut to the heart of him and produce instant wakefulness—the sound/change in air pressure of a door or window, the sound of the kids, the sound of Sam and his phone. 

It's reflex that has him scooping up the cell on the first tentative buzz-slide across the nightstand. Just reflex and in no way anticipation, because—although he knows already it'll be Sam—Sam never calls him for _that_.

Mostly he succeeds in not being too bitter about it.

"Yeah?"

Sam's voice sounds fuzzed with sleep and oddly crushed. "I think something's happened to Tammy."

Tammy is one of their network, the loose coalition of hunters they work with so that Sam and Dean could stay in one place and have something resembling the normal life Sam wanted so bad. Because that went so well.

Dean sits up, the sheet falling to his waist in body-heated folds. The other side of the bed is empty and cool; Lena hasn't come home from her night out yet. He feels the headache he went to bed with return to spike savagely through his temples. "You think or you know?" he demands, brusquer than he intends.

"I…" Sam fumbles and in his mind, Dean can picture him, one hand combing through sleep-untidy hair. Dean doesn't let his mind wander any further afield than that. 

_Focus._

"Something's happened to Tammy," Sam says again, finally. "I don't… Couldn't get a clear fix on what, but…it was bad."

"How bad?" Dean's already out of bed and legging it into yesterday's jeans. He wonders if Marta Tedesco next door can be persuaded to take the kids until Lena shows up—whenever the fuck that might be. Dean clamps down on his anger, pooling it where he can use it later, when it's useful.

"Bad enough that I had my head in the toilet puking for the last forty-five minutes before I called you," Sam answers dryly. Then he hesitates, so clearly Dean can hear the break.  
"Dean… I think I should go with you."

Dean straightens up from his half-filled duffle, _something_ —he can't decide between cold and electric—zipping down his spine. He's learned not to doubt Sam's visions over the years. It feels like a hundred questions are stomping around in his forebrain, first among them a blunt and simple 'why?', but what he says is, "I don't think your firm would appreciate their sparkly new lawyer running off and possibly getting his pretty face all messed up, do you? That doesn't look good in court."

"I quit."

"Wh…what?" The last time Dean was caught that off-guard by something, he ended up with four claw-gouges horizontally across his back and Sam had spent half the night stitching him back together, whispering dire threats against Dean if he even _thought_ about passing out or worse. This feels a lot like that. "You did what?"

"I quit," Sam says again in the same taut-flat voice. "Call me when you're downstairs. I'll be ready."

"Sam—" Dean blurts, but it's already too late. Sam's gone.

***

" _You brought the kids?_ " Sam asks incredulously when he goes to throw his bag in the back seat and finds it already full of sleeping little people and quilted pastel bags bulging with diapers, toys and cans and bottles of food.

Dean shrugs. His mouth is already in the taut, unhappy line that makes Sam regret asking the question. "Lena wasn't home and our neighbors are out of town visiting family. There wasn't anyone else I could ask. I left a note."

Sam's mouth makes its own regretful quirk at the reminder of the smallness of their circle. "Yeah. Okay. Pop the trunk, yeah?"

Sam tosses his bag in and then piles into the front seat with Dean. He still feels exhausted and a little high from all the puking, his stomach growling and scraping at his spine. 

"Y'okay?" Dean asks, one hand falling onto Sam's thigh. It's a casual gesture, you know? One they've made a million other times, but something about it, so soon after his skin has remembered what Dean feels like against it makes Sam fight not to jump, his dick twitching a little in his shorts.

"Yeah," Sam says, a little huskier than he's totally comfortable with. He clears his throat. "I'd just like to stop and get some coffee before we get too far along, okay?"

"Yeah," Dean says, finally lifting his hand and pulling out from the curb. "The kids are gonna be hungry soon anyway."

They end up going through McDonald's drive through and Sam drinks his coffee hot and one-handed, driving, while Dean, leaning over the seat, feeds first Evan, who is hyper and cranky, then Kait, who most emphatically is _not_ , sleepy-eyed and mellow. Miria, who is theoretically old enough to feed herself, wants to talk through the entire meal and ends up with a good half of it smeared across her face and bib and her overalls underneath. 

"Kid's like you," Dean says for the hundredth time since Miria was born, "never shuts up."

Sam nods, pretending that he's focusing on the road. The crazy thing is that he never gets tired of Dean saying it, some tangible proof that Dean still thinks about him in _some_ context other than _selfish fucker who walked out on me—us._

The years of silence at Stanford still loom so large in his mind, aching like a phantom limb; sometimes he thinks he should kiss Dean's feet—and Dad's ( _mayherestinpeace_ ) for wiring Dean this way—for being able to hold a grudge against anyone and anything _but_ Sam. 

" _Dad,_ " Miria says then, stern and commanding and Sam really does focus on his driving as Dean slips away from him into his role as family man.

***

"So how do you want to do this?" Sam asks when everything is unloaded and Dean's setting up the portable playpen.

Jesus. Sam feels like he should take a picture or something. Miria's on Dean's back, chattering away, plump arms locked around his neck in what has to be a stranglehold and Evan's doing his best to gum apart something purple and plastic while steadily banging a wooden block on the carpet. The cloud of dust he's raising makes Sam wince, but Dean doesn't seem worried, so whatever. Kait lounges in her car seat still and sometimes Sam wonders if she's really Dean's kid at all, because no Winchester is ever that chill and from what he knows of Yelena, she's no better.

"What do you mean?" Dean asks and settles back on his haunches, eyeing the playpen with a critical eye before he looks up at Sam. "Honey, you're choking me," he says mildly to Miria, and she wriggles higher up onto his shoulders without releasing her death grip.

"Well, somebody's got to stay with the kids," Sam points out.

Dean shrugs and swings Miria off his shoulders entirely. "You're the retired one. I figured you'd do it."

Sam tries not to look as horrified as he feels. He's spent time around the kids; of course he has. But it's pretty much always been under Dean's watchful eyes. They left Miria with him solo exactly once, not long after she was born. She cried the whole time, loud and fretful, no matter how many bottles of formula he'd carefully prepped and heated, how many times he'd changed her diaper and through the many many circuits around his apartment, bouncing and muttering and singing (which he does _not_ do well). Dean later told him that it was colic but Sam has always darkly suspected that it's just him. Besides… 

"I really don't think it's a good idea for you to go alone, Dean. Seriously."

Dean sighs and rakes a hand through his hair. It's actually really long, Sam notices with surprise. For Dean, anyway. "Yeah, well, unless you've got babysitter in a can, Sam, I'm not seeing a lot of other alternatives. Yeah…Miria, honey? Why don't you get your crayons out of your bag and draw Uncle Sammy a picture."

"Don't wanna!" Miria insists, crossing her arms and scowling fearsomely.

"Okay, how about me? Would you draw me a picture?"

Miria's arms uncross and her expression smoothes out. "Of Mommy?"

Dean's face _twitches_ , too fast for Sam to read the expression but he knows Dean's careful tone intimately as Dean answers, "Yeah. Draw Mommy."

"Okay!" Miria turns and darts for a lavender bag half-buried by the rest of their luggage. She grabs the nylon straps and tugs ferociously, leaning at an almost ninety-degree angle backwards.

"Here," Sam says, reaching. "Let me help…"

"No!" Miria insists, twisting away like a fish on a line. "M'a big girl! I can do it!"

Sam backs off hastily, hands raised. "Okay. Sorry." He settles on the bed next to Dean, who's scrubbing his eyes with his fore and middle fingers of both hands. The mattress is soft and his weight pitches them both inward so their shoulders bump. "God. How did Dad do this?"

Dean shrugs and they watch Miria wrestle with the bag until it comes free in one jerk, tumbling the toddler down hard on her ass. Sam winces in anticipation of tears but Miria only pops up like she's on springs, rubs her butt with one little hand, an _owie_ expression on her small, serious face and says reproachfully to Sam, " _Told_ you."

"Miria," Dean says warningly.

"But Dad…"

"No, Miri, you show your Uncle Sammy some respect."

Miria looks down at her feet. "Sorry," she says ungraciously.

"Good. Now c'mere." Dean holds out his arms and she comes to him, still looking at the floor. "You okay?"

"I hurt my butt, Dad."

"I know you did." Dean ruffles his hand over her hair and Miria pushes up into the touch like a kitten. "Think you'll live?"

Miria nods.

"That's my girl."

"C'n I color now?" Miria asks plaintively, wiping her nose.

Dean uses the tail of his tee-shirt to scrub her face and she giggles and pushes him away. "Yeah, go ahead," Dean says, snagging the cooler and handing her a juice box. "Here."

"So what's the plan?" Sam asks as Miria flops down on her belly on the carpet with her juice box and bag. Sam wonders if they should put a blanket or towel or something under her. Motel carpets are…ugh. When he looks back at Dean, though, all he can think of is how tired his brother looks and he's plagued by the same sense of uneasiness that brought him here in the first place.

"Same plan as before." Dean shrugs again. "I do some hunting while you womenfolk," he nudges Sam's shoulder, "mind the little 'uns."

"No, I meant _your_ plan," Sam corrects him and doesn't even cuss Dean out for the 'womenfolk' crack. He thinks he might deserve some kind of minor sainthood for that.

"Oh." Dean straightens and stretches backwards. Sam is momentarily mesmerized by the line of his throat, wanting to bite it, mark it. God. How can Dean still make him this horny? "Figured I'd head past Tammy's place. See if she's there, if not poke around and see if there's anything might tell us what happened, what she was into."

"We could go with you," Sam says and Dean freezes. "Me and the kids."

"Sammy—"

"We can stay in the car, Dean. Dad used to do it all the time."

"Yeah, and how often did you bitch about that?"

Sam looks down, picking at the fraying edge of his sleeve. "I know. But I just... I don't want you going alone. This whole thing makes me nervous."

"But you want me to take my kids?"

 _No, I want you to take me._ But that isn't Dean's point and Sam knows it, however it makes his skin crawl to think of Dean going alone. He can't tell if he's out of practice or whether something here is just that _wrong_ , but he's broken out in goosebumps like some kind of rash. "Dean, you know I'd defend them to the death."

"Yeah, I know." Dean sighs, rubbing his thigh thoughtfully. "Let's hope it doesn't come down to that."

Miria comes back towards them, bearing a piece of paper nearly half her size. "Hey, honey," Dean says, holding his hand out. "All done with your picture?"

Miria nods.

"Can I see?"

Miria shakes her head. "Not for you," she says, holding the page close like she's afraid Dean will snatch it away. "S'for Uncle Sammy." She holds it out and she's got Lena's brown eyes, but the look in them—hopeful and sort of naked—is pure Dean.

"Thank you," Sam's startled but takes the paper from her gamely. Miria tends more towards the impressionist; no clear stick figures here for him to decipher, only thick scribbles of purple and brown and—oddly disconcerting—a single blood-red line corkscrewing through it all. "Um," Sam says, floundering under Miria _and_ Dean's expectant looks. "What is it?"

Dean snorts and bumps him in the shoulder. Miria sighs heavily and crowds her way up into his lap. "That's me, 'n Evan, 'n Kait, 'n Dad." Miria points at some black crayon glyphs Sam had missed on his first look, huddled small under the looming curtains of purple and brown. "'N there's you, Uncle Sammy." She points to another black crayon figure, barely visible in the layers of other colors.

Sam knows it's ridiculous to read too much into a kid's drawing; knows it on a completely rational, intellectual level. But it's his emotions that have been scrubbed raw and left oozy lately and it's his emotions bleeding a little bit now wondering if this is how Miria sees him, separate from the rest of the family. Like he's not even really a Winchester anymore. Like he gave that up, when he walked away.

"What am I doing?" he asks, feeling numb and more than a little distant.

Miria shrugs, already starting to fidget. Dean mutters something about _ingratitude_ and _third degree_.

"And all this?" He points at the bands of color, heavy and somehow menacing with that one thread of intense scarlet like arterial spray.

Miria shrugs again.

***

"So. You wanna tell me what's going on with you and Lena?" Sam asks over the noise of Evan's wordless prattle ("Ba. Ba ba ba duh.") and Miria's rendition of "The Wheels on the Bus" ("The wheels on the bus go drowned and drowned…").

Dean stiffens and darts a look sideways, hands clenched on the Impala's wheel. "You want to talk about why you quit your cushy job at Jerkwad, Lickspittle and Butthead?"

Sam's lips thin to a single line and he hunches deeper into his hoodie, feeling chilled even though it's not a cold day. "So we're not talking about it, then?"

"Sure looks that way," Dean answers blandly.

"Fine."

"Fine."

"Dad, can I have another juice box?" Miria chirps from the back.

Sam can tell it's an effort for Dean to unclench his jaw and gentle his voice but Dean's been practicing. "No, you may not. Too much sugar isn't good for you. Do you want water instead?"

Miria slumps as far down as her car seat lets her, looking out from under the tangle of her blonde bangs. "No," she says disappointed. Then she straightens. "What about Kait? She wants a juice box."

Sam has his doubts about that, but Kait suddenly lets out this piercing squeal, the loudest noise Sam's ever heard her make. He can't tell if it's in response to Miria—either protest or confirmation—or just coincidence.

Dean looks searchingly at them in the rearview and then nods. "Yeah, okay. Sam?" He transfers his glance sideways.

"Yeah." Sam undoes his seatbelt and twists around for the cooler in the foot well behind his seat.

"She can't handle the straw," Dean says, "but there should be a sippie cup in the blue diaper bag. Pour it in there."

 _Sippie cup. Jesus._ Sam fishes it out, a thick, sturdy thing of bright blue plastic with unbelievably bright yellow ducks doing the conga around the side.

"No," Miria says. "That's _Evan's._ " Sam wonders if sarcasm is like your eyeballs—the same size from birth—and so Miria's got the whole Winchester legacy all pressed down and concentrated into her small, small body. It's the only thing that makes sense.

He looks over his shoulder at Dean. "Does it _matter_?"

Dean nods. He actually looks apologetic. "Yeah. I know it's weird and all but they won't share cups or utensils. Drives Lena nuts. Kait's cup is green."

Sam huffs a sigh and goes back to rummaging, muttering words like _spoiled_ and _could've said so_ until Dean smacks him one in the ass. Sam jerks a little—he isn't even sure Dean notices—his cock grinding momentarily against the seat back. Sam ignores it and—if he even noticed—Dean does too. After another second's fishing, Sam produces the aforementioned _green_ sippie cup. This one has butterflies in dusty purple and at the sight of it, Kait makes that joyous squealing noise again and holds out her arms, grinning.

"Hang on," Sam mutters. He tries ripping open the waxed cardboard with his chewed and nonexistent fingernails but the juice box defies his efforts, the cartoon apple on the front grinning smugly at him. Finally, after a couple minutes wrestling while Dean snickers, Sam tugs his pocket knife from his back pocket, flicks the blade open and saws through the top. Apple juice slops over his fingers as he transfers it into the cup, but he still feels pretty triumphant. Kait's legs kick and she makes urgent noises as she strains for the cup.

"Yeah, yeah, hang on," Sam says again, screwing the lid down.

"We're almost there, O Mighty Slayer of Juice Boxes," Dean says blandly. "You wanna put your butt back in the seat before we get pulled over?"

If Sam had the leverage—and wasn't worried about crashing the Impala—he would've kicked Dean.

"Dad, c'n I have that water now?" Miria asks and Sam slumps over the seat in defeat.

***

Properly hydrated, they pull up in front of Tammy's building. The neighborhood doesn't seem so much bad as _tired_ , as if the badness had been squeezed out of it by crushing poverty long ago; weedy vacant lots and more houses that have been boarded up than look occupied. But the block itself seems quiet and the lived in houses are well-kept, well cared for. There's a community garden a few doors down from Tammy's, a couple women and a handful of kids working among the corn and tomato plants.

"Looks quiet enough," Sam says, slouching down to look at the narrow yellow brick two-flat. If he remembers correctly—and Dean knows he does—Tammy rents out the upper floor and garden apartment, living on the first floor with her son, Isaiah.

"Yeah," Dean agrees, leaning half over Sam so he can look out the window too. All at once, he becomes aware that his hand is braced on Sam's thigh, his thumb making reflexive circles over the muscle.

For such a long time, they just _didn't_ touch, the carefully negotiated bubble that allowed them to have something—a relationship—after Sam left him. Now that bubble is popped, they can touch again, but every contact—deliberate or accidental—is like a thunderbolt, arcing from his brain, through his heart, straight down to his dick. 

"What was Tammy's specialty?" Sam's voice is just a touch too high for normal, but Dean can tell he's trying to get there, same as Dean. "Did she have one?"

"Nah, she was like us. Jack-of-all-Trades."

"Not much help, then. She keep a book?" 

"Yeah, 'course," Dean says absently, still staring out the window at Tammy's building. It's a sunny day, the building looks perfectly normal, but Dean can't help but think of Sam's voice, saying, "It's bad…" Dean shakes his head, giving Sam's leg a squeeze then drawing back to the other side of the car. 

"Dad?" Miria takes her headphones off and leans forward against her car seat belt. "I'm tired of bein' in the car. C'n I go play with the big kids?" She points out the windshield at the garden. 

"No, I need you to stay with Uncle Sammy and help him keep an eye on Kait and Evan." Though he'd needled Sam about it, Dean feels a sudden flooding rush of memories; of being just as young as Miria, waiting with baby Sam in the stifling heat of the car. 

All at once, he snaps himself back. It's not the same. And his children don't—and won't—live that life. Not unless they want to. Not unless they _choose_ to. If he can't give them anything else, he can give them that. 

And his good looks. 

Leaning over the seat, Dean says confidingly, "You know Uncle Sammy isn't so great with kids."

It's a struggle for Dean to keep his face straight when Miria nods vigorously and says, "Oh, boy, yeah!"

"Hey," Sam protests weakly. 

"So, can you help Uncle Sammy for me?" Dean asks, resolutely not thinking about how this is what his life's become: exerting all his considerable charisma on charming a three year old. 

"O-kay," Miria agrees airily, putting her headphones back on. For good measure, he gives her a coloring book and a handful of crayons. Dean can practically sense the moment he slips from her awareness. Evan's napping, fat limbs twitching in some kind of baby dream and Kait's hanging out placidly, thinking deep thoughts, for all Dean knows. There's no reason to keep putting this off.

Dean gets out of the car and makes it all the way around before he pauses. "I'm serious, Sam." Dean leans on the passenger's side and looks down into Sam's upturned face. "Stay in the car. Don't leave the kids."

"Dean, I'm not deaf or mentally disabled," Sam sighs, sounding more like his pissy self. "I got it."

"That's debatable, but we are having this conversation." Dean grins wide on that one and slouches off fast, before Sam can come up with a good enough jab that won't set off the kids. When Dean hop-steps up the short flight to Tammy's stoop and looks back, Sam's got both middle fingers extended, pointing down, below the kids' sightline. Dean's grin widens.

This is the part that feels good, memories that don't hurt or veer off in strange, bittersweet directions. Him and Sam, hunting. Dean hasn't missed it, exactly, but man, it is sweet, knowing Sam's there, watching his back. 

Dean kicks a small pile of mail coming in the door to Tammy's apartment, but other than that, nothing looks any more out of place than it should for a single mother with a young child. Dean squats and sorts through the collection of circulars, bills and junk. No correspondence, not that he expects any. Who writes letters anymore, anyway?

Searching through the storage spaces below the front-window seats, Dean can't keep his eyes off the Impala, the shaggy mop of Sam's hair visible through the open window. He hates this jumpy skittishness, especially when he needs to be focusing on the job, but that car is and contains everything he loves in the world. 

Shaking himself, Dean moves deeper into the house.

***

"Y'all looking for Tammy?"

The woman walking toward the Impala, bent over to catch Sam's gaze, makes Sam tense up, fingers straying toward the glove-box. He doesn't know what Dean's keeping in there these days, but he knows without question there's something. 

The woman doesn't look especially suspicious, medium brown and sharp-boned, long hair hanging in finger-thick braids, but even for as long as Sam's been out of it, he knows better than to trust looks.

"Yeah," Sam agrees cautiously. He opens the car's door and climbs out, wanting to face any potential threat on his feet and with some space around him. "She been around lately?"

The woman straightens, showing she's tall, too. She wipes dirt stained hands down her hips and shrugs carelessly. "Not for a while." Green-hazel eyes—a startling match for Dean's—look him up and down. "She said if anything happened to her, some white boys might come looking. Is that you?"

Sam grins, in spite of himself. "Don't come a whole lot whiter."

The woman huffs a laugh, the wary-tight corners of her lips quirking up. "Kenya Greene," she says, offering her hand.

"Sam Winchester." He holds out his hand in return and, too late, it occurs to him Dean might want him to use an alias. Oh, well. Too late for that. 

Kenya has a firm grip; after a solid handshake, she folds her arms tightly across her ribs. "So does that mean something's happened?" There's a deeper south in her accent, slurring _that_ into a more _zh_ sound; Sam wonders idly where it comes from.

"I…" So mentally busy with his own suspicions and worries, Sam trips over the realization that he and Dean aren't the only one concerned about Tammy and her son. "I don't know," he admits. "That's what we're here to find out."

"Aw, damn." Kenya shakes her head. "I like Tammy a lot, but she's always chasing trouble." She rubs her arms as if she's cold, leaving new smears of dirt on her hard, wiry biceps. 

"How do you mean?" Sam spots Dean legging it out from behind the two-flat; quick, but not so quick as if he found anything. 

Kenya catches his redirected gaze and turns to see Dean coming. Nothing about her body language says she's afraid, but she moves so she won't be sandwiched between them, just the same. 

She goes on, though: "I don't really know. Ain't no legs on my moral high horse." Again she crosses her arms, a fierce fortress of bone. "But." Her work-booted foot taps on the concrete. "Look, I don't know you guys from nowhere and you don't know me. I'm a damn atheist, man. I don't believe in all this shit." Again Sam hears that stray, purring _zh_ in Kenya's speech. 

"But Tammy…she's _haunted_. And whatever it was...is, it keeps her from ever really being able to put down roots for her and Isaiah, much as I can tell she wants to." She nods to Dean, stiffer, pulling herself back together after her confession. "Other white boy. You find what you were looking for?"

Dean glances a question at Sam; Sam signals back an affirmative, expressions familiar as every other piece of each other's bodies. 

"No," Dean says finally, tucking his thumbs in his back pocket. It looks like a harmless and hayseed gesture to anyone who doesn't know there's a weapon back there, knife or gun, maybe both. "The house is clean, I didn't find anything that might've told me what she was working on."

"Y'all should go over 'n talk to Angie."

Dean's gaze cuts to her, sharp, hunting. "Angela Edgelow?"

Kenya shrugs. "I don't know her last name," she says, gesturing off to the west. "She's got a shop over on Broad Street." Kenya's lip curls. "Tarot cards, palm readings, you know what I mean. Always promising she can call up your dead mama or rich uncle or whatever." This time when Kenya crosses her arms, it's contemptuous, not scared. "Taking good money from peoples ain't got none, if you ask me, but she does good business, very good. Lives right over it. She and Tammy're thick as thieves and it's Angie who usually keeps Isaiah, when Tammy goes out of town."

"Her son just died, not too long ago, didn't he?" Dean asks, his voice roughening, deepening over the question. Since this is the first Sam's heard of Angela—or her son—Sam double-takes at Dean, but Dean just gives a slight headshake: _Later._

Kenya's lips press together; she glances back toward the garden, the gaggle of children working and playing. "Yes, she did," she agrees, low, regretful. "For all I don't like her much, I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Awful thing, too. Boy had a heart defect and no one knew a thing until he dropped dead. That boy was her one light shining. I can't even imagine what that's like."

"Let's hope we never have to," Dean says, still in that gruff voice, glancing again at the Impala.

***

"What was that about?" Sam asked, when they've pulled out from the curb.

Dean grimaces. "I saw the funeral program stuck in Tammy's mirror," he explains, which really is no explanation at all. 

The boy, Khalil, was twice Miria's age, but Dean wasn't thinking about that, looking at Khalil's bright, young, fat-rounded face, his baby-toothed grin. He'd only been able to think about the horror of it: losing a child. 

"Anything else?"

Dean shrugs, sneakily grateful to Sam for not questioning deeper. He doesn't feel a speck of shame about showing his love for his kids, but it feels weirdly embarrassing to talk about his fears for them, the uncontrollable concern over every injury, cough and fever. Or, worse, that someday the things that they hunt will follow him home. Old Yellow Eyes might be gone, but there's plenty of other dangers out there. Lurking. Waiting for their moment. 

"There were clothes missing from her closet and Isaiah's, so I'm guessing she was on a hunting trip." Dean glances in the rearview, but Miria's still knocked out, flushed and open-mouthed. "I'm hoping maybe this Angela isn't just a charlatan, maybe she can tell us what Tammy was into."

Sam shakes his head. "I don't get it, though. If she was on a hunting trip, why would my vision lead us here, and not wherever she was working?"

"Maybe your vision's wrong?" Dean means it to come out teasing, but it just sounds hopeful to his ears. 

Sam gives him raised eyebrows and epic bitchface. "My visions are never _wrong_. Hard to interpret sometimes, but not wrong."

"All the more reason for me to drop you and the kids back at the motel."

Sam jerks upright from his slouch. "What? Dean, no!" His voice is too loud, booming, either waking Kait from her nap or scaring the crap out of her so that she starts crying, a cranky and persistent droning wail that scrapes at Dean's nerves like a rasp. Evan, following his twin like he does in most things, wakes up and adds his wailing. 

"Good job, Uncle Sammy," Dean says.

"I'm sorry," Sam says, slinging his arm over the seat and twisting to look at the twins, like there's a goddamn thing he can do from that position. 

Dean blows out his breath and wheels on over to the curb. Going off on Sam with a car full of small children who've been cooped up all day…there's probably something more stupid than that, but Dean can't rightly think of what it is. 

Miria wakes up while they're unstrapping the twins, and there's no way _she's_ sitting in the car alone, so Dean unbuckles her too, gives her a sandwich and a bunch of grapes from the cooler and then goes back to juggling Kait up and down.

"Look, it's dangerous," Sam hisses, coming around to Dean's side of the car, cuddling Evan to his chest like he's afraid he's going to break him. It's been three years and still, some part of Sam is flinching every time he's got to touch one of Dean's kids. 

"All the more reason not to _take my kids into it_ ," Dean says, in the same low-but-pointed voice. "Or you."

"I can take care of myself, Dean!"

"You haven't been hunting in five years, Sam!" Jesus fucking Christ, this kid! "You've been sitting on your ass—"

"Daddy, you said a bad word." 

"Yes, I know, honey. What did I say about grown-up conversations?"

"I don't know," Miria lies, with a sly, sweet smile that reminds him sickly of her mother. 

"Miria," Dean says warningly. "It's not okay to tell lies."

Sam chokes, the bastard, and turns away, walking Evan down the block. Double bastard. 

Kait screaming like a siren in his ears, Dean takes a knee. "C'mere, sweetheart." He holds out his other arm. Miria looks at him doubtfully for a second, but when he wiggles his fingers, she crowds into his side, leaning her head on his shoulder with a sigh. "You know I don't like it when you lie to me," he says.

"Yeah, I know," Miria agrees, her attention already elsewhere. Dean sighs.

"I'm sorry I said a bad word. We'll both have to try better to be good, huh?"

"Okay, Daddy."

Dean smiles and kisses her forehead. It's warm and sweaty and her skin's taken on that toddler-particular cookies and dirt aroma. "That's my girl." Taking Miria's hand, he stands up. "C'mon, let's go find Uncle Sammy and Evan."

They meet up with Uncle Sammy and Evan in about half a block, coming back toward them. Sam's holding Evan more like a normal human being and Evan's calmed down, though he's rubbernecking like a tourist.

"I was thinking we should get some lunch and head back to the motel," Dean says.

"I was just coming to tell you," Sam twists, pointing back the way he came. Evan crows delightedly at the sudden change of position. "The store's just a few doors down that way. Why don't we at least check it out, see if this Angela Edgelowe knows anything and then we can head back, I'll hit the computer and you can do…" He gestures at Miria and Kait, "…whatever it is you need to do with the kids."

Dean does not get what's going on with Sam, but between him pushing and the kids pulling, Dean's halfway to grinding his teeth to chalk. "Fine," he agrees. Edgelow is Tammy's best friend. They need to question her and maybe it'll do all of them some good to get out of the Impala for a while, stretch their legs, get some air. Kait's finally calming down, hiccupping isolated sobs and big, tear-filled eyes that seem to demand: _why, Daddy, why?_

It's a good question. Why?

"Let's check it out."

"Dean—"

"We're doing what you want!" Dean says, "Are we seriously going to argue about this?"

Careful not to pull Miria along faster than her little legs can take her—seriously, there's nothing he hates more than parents dragging their kids behind them—Dean takes off for the store. 

This feels so fucking _weird_ , this intersection of his hunting and home life, him and Sam, fucking again, hunting again, arguing again, like they've been sucked into some time warp. Except the kids are here. It's like he doesn't know what year it is. 

"Dean." Sam catches up—of course he does, on those stilt legs—and grabs Dean by the shoulder. "Dean, wait. I'm sorry." 

Dean stops.

"I don't want to fight, okay? I'm just trying to help. I just want to help."

Dean nods. He's got a whole bunch of things on the edge of his tongue, but he doesn't want to say it here, and he doesn't want to say it now, out in front of the kids and out in public. Which pretty much sums up their whole relationship now, doesn't it? 

"Later," is what he settles for, bitter acid in his mouth. He nods his chin toward Edgelow's storefront. "Let's just get this done."

***

Angela Edgelow's shop is pretty much everything Sam would expect, dark, dusty and mysterious. In fact, as Evan lets out a deep, slobbering sneeze, dustier than just atmosphere can explain. He looks around for some kind of tissue or wipe.

"Jesus Christ, dude." Dean rolls his eyes. "Here," he says, handing Sam Kait, "trade." He tugs Evan from Sam's arm and uses the tail of his overshirt to swipe Evan's face clean. Without even turning to look, he intones, "Miri, put it down."

Sam, who'd completely lost track of the toddler, searches her out and sees her put down a large chunk of fluorite crystal. 

"C'mere," Dean says, holding out his hand, and Miria gives the fluorite one last, longing look before pattering over and taking his fingers. "Anybody here?" Dean calls, walking toward where the back of the narrow shop is shrouded in hangings and curtains of beads. "Hello?"

There's a loud, crashing thump from the rear, loud enough that Miria and Evan yelp and Kait starts crying again. Dean holds Miria's hand out to Sam. "Get the kids back to the car," he says tersely. "I don't li—"

The center curtain pushes aside. "I'm very sorry," says the light-skinned, heavily freckled woman—presumably Angela Edgelow—who emerges. "I dropped a box; I didn't mean to scare anyone. Especially such lovely children." She smiles at Dean, at Sam, though it doesn't quite reach her eyes. "The two of you have a lovely family." 

It feels like every piece of Sam's skin catches fire. He freezes and glances at Dean, feeling caught out, exposed. 

It only lasts a second; there's no reason to think Angela is operating on anything more than what she sees: two men who don't look very much alike and three very small kids between them. They'd been mistaken as a couple plenty of times while they were on the road. No reason it should be different now.

_Every reason it's different now._

Except his brother is his lover again, for the first time in a long time. 

Sam looks down at Kait, too much noise in his head to keep looking at Edgelow, or Dean. She seems to have more or less cried herself out, head on Sam's shoulder, breath hitching irregularly. Sam rubs her back, sweaty and solid under his hands. 

"I'm Dean Winchester, this is my brother, Sam," Dean says and Sam jerks. He's not sure why. Maybe just because Dean doesn't sound nearly as affected as Sam. "We're Tammy's friends. We're looking for her."

"Oh." Angela wavers on her feet, reaching out to a nearby table to steady herself. Dean puts a hand out, grabbing her shoulder and anchoring her further. Weaker, Angela says, "I knew something bad had happened."

"Why do you say that?" Dean shifts Evan to his left arm. 

She blinks up at Dean and Sam realizes she only seems taller than she is because of the height of her headwrap. "She was supposed to be back to pick up Isaiah two days ago."

Something about the matter-of-factness of her voice makes Sam laugh, brief and yelping, which he quickly buries in a cough when Angela and Dean turn to look at him. "Sorry," he apologizes, embarrassed heat scalding his neck and face.

"Bless you, Uncle Sammy," Miria says, holding up an ancient and fraying tissue and heaven only knows where she got it from. 

Sam opens his mouth to object that he wasn't sneezing, but then the reality kicks in: does he really want to argue with a three year old about this? So he takes this tissue. "Thanks, Miri."

"…about what she was working on?" Dean isn't waiting for Sam to get his shit together. No surprise there, though for once, Sam is grateful. 

"No." Angela shakes her head. "Oh…don't play with that, honey." She takes a couple steps toward Sam, waving Miria down from the small stepladder at the foot of one of the tall bookcases. Sam hadn't even noticed she'd let go of his hand. Dean glares at him; Sam can feel it on his skin even as he moves tardily to grab her again. 

"Here, why don't you go over to that table and pick out a pretty necklace for yourself?" Angela points toward a low table with beaded and junk metal necklaces, wooden and adjustable rings, leather and braided bracelets. 

"C'n I, Dad?" 

Sam glances back at Dean, too, but he knows he's not the reason Dean's eyes soften and warm. "Yeah, Miri, go ahead."

"She's a lovely girl," Angela says, ruffling Miria's hair briefly before folding her hands and returning her attention to Dean. "Tammy didn't talk much about her…trips. She thought it would be dangerous for me to know and since I was watching Isaiah while she's gone…" Angela shrugs, tucking her hands in her pockets. "Neither one of us wanted any trouble showing up here." Angela grimaces, a sudden stiff tic that reminds Sam that, for all Angela and Tammy's precautions, Angela had lost her son anyway.

Angela jerks her chin at Dean with Evan in his arms. "I'm surprised you brought your children with you," she says. "Especially if it's as dangerous as Tammy always said."

"Yeah, well, our job benefits don't extend to childcare," Dean jokes with his usual amount of tact. "It was this or leave them in the car with the windows cracked."

_Aw, Jeez, **Dean** …_

Sam doesn't have a great view of Angela's face but he can see the way her back straightens and stiffens, small, birdlike shoulders squaring up under the wide angel-wings of her dress's sleeves. "You make jokes," Angela says, a blistering venom in her otherwise quiet voice, "but if something—anything—happened to these children because of your _irresponsibility_ , it wouldn't be so funny, then. I thought Tammy was bad enough, coming and going at all hours and days of the week, vanishing for who knows how long, poor Isaiah never knowing if he's ever going to see her again…"

Sam sees that one strike home with Dean, a solid hit that rocks him on his heels like she buried an axe in his chest. Sam's got his own Gordian knot of reminiscence and regret cinching tight enough to squeeze blood from the stone of his heart.

"…but at least she had the sense to leave Isaiah where he'd be safe, and _loved_ and cared for…"

Another direct hit, though this one's for Dean alone, and it ignites a return spark in Dean's cold, hard eyes. 

"I swear, I don't think any of you should be allowed to have children, if you choose to take this path of recklessness, if you take for granted for one second the amazing gift the gods have bestowed upon you, despite the fact that you are _undoubtedly_ undeserving of such a miracle…and for what? Violence and bloodshed and nightmares that wake your child from a sound sleep with your shrieking?"

"Uncle Sammy?" Miria tugs at Sam's shirt. "I don't like it here anymore, I wanna go."

Sam glances at Dean, who's still building to a righteous head of steam. This can't end well. "Yeah, that seems like a good idea," Sam agrees. "Why don't we go outside and wait for your dad?"

Just out of spite, he pockets the hunk of fluorite on his way out the door.

***

"I… I don't know what I'm doing wrong," Sam says, the muscles in his arm bunching as he struggles not to throw the pea-smeared spoon at the wall. "She doesn't want it. I don't… She doesn't want it." Kait turns her face away again, grunting in protest, hands waving.

"Dude." Dean inhales, thunder before the storm…but then all at once, Dean lets it go. "All right, fine. I got it. Why don't you fire up the laptop, see what you can find?"

It's what Sam wants, it's a relief, an escape. At the same time, it feels too much like how Dean deals with Lena. Sam takes a deep breath of his own, using his forearm to push his hair back from his forehead. "No," he says, with gritted patience, "I want to do it right, just tell me what I'm doing wrong."

Dean plants a hand on his thigh and looks at Sam. Dean says Sam's the one who makes bitchface, but Dean's got a pretty good one on his own. "You really want to know?"

"I wouldn't be asking if I didn't."

"You're making too damn big a deal out of it." Dean flips his hand at Sam and Kait, shrugging. "You're stressed out and that's stressing her out. Seriously, man, just get on the laptop. I got it. This little piggy's about to go down for a nap anyway." Dean grins down at Evan, giving the toddler's belly a gentle jiggle. Evan giggles, kicking hard. 

Giving up—and wondering what the hell he and Jess had _ever_ been thinking, about someday having kids—Sam swings Kait's seat off the table's surface and sets it on the carpet next to Dean. He's probably only imagining it that Kait makes a face at him.

On the laptop, at least, Sam's back on familiar turf. He falls down the intoxicating k-hole of research and doesn't come up again until Dean's fingers settle on his shoulders, squeezing tension he didn't even know was there from his trapeziuses. Sam gasps, the sudden deep pressure and that he's suddenly ridiculously sensitized to Dean's touch shocking.

"Be _quiet_ ," Dean says, leaning over Sam's shoulder to bring their faces close, foreheads touching. "Quit acting like a scared virgin. I'm only going to stick it in a little." Dean grins at his own joke and straightens, going back to kneading Sam's shoulders. "Whatcha got?"

"Still haven't found anything about Tammy specifically." Sam tries not to moan the words, leaning back into the massage. He hadn't really been aware of it until Dean started, but his back is like rebar and concrete instead of flesh. "But there's definitely something going on. Look." Sam switches between the different tabs. "Someone's been digging up and stealing bodies from the local graveyards. Oh, _ohhh_ …" Sam momentarily loses the ability to make words when Dean's thumbs rub hard circles up his neck.

Heat flushes through him, pain and pleasure, impossible to separate and an intense awareness of his own body, the hard throb of his cock and the lack of room in his jeans to accommodate it. "Dean—"

"You horny fucker," Dean says, but he sounds approving. "Be _quiet._ If you wake the twins up, I will break you in half." He tips Sam's head back, stroking across Sam's Adam's apple. 

All at once, Sam shrugs Dean off of him, pushing out of the chair and going—not fleeing—into the bathroom. He's sweating and his heart's beating so hard, he can hear it in his ears, a dry swish that only speeds up the more he listens. Sam braces on his knees, bent over and not entirely sure he won't puke.

"What the hell was that?" Dean opens the bathroom door and slips in. "Hey, are you—"

Sam lunges for him, flattening Dean to the wall and taking Dean's face in both hands to maul their mouths together. Dean's eyes widen, and the defensive hands he brought up to Sam's ribs spasm to the rhythm of a choked noise Dean makes in his throat. A second later, he surrenders, the fingers so ready to push Sam away gathering him in, instead; the long-lashed eyes fluttering shut at the same time his lips open to Sam's demand.

It's one of those kisses that goes on forever, but a forever that isn't long enough, driven apart by the need to breathe and a frustrating inability to merge into a single being.

"I don't know how to do this," Sam says, rolling their foreheads together and breathing hot across Dean's swollen mouth. "I want, I _need_ …" He molds his brother's body with his hands, every part of him exactly as Sam remembers. How can he be so familiar and everything else _so fucking different_? "I'm sorry. I'm sorry." Sam can't finish the thought, not even sure himself what he means. It's easier to retreat, literally and figuratively, taking a step back and settling his hip on the sink's edge. 

Dean stands pinned to the wall a sec, his face soft and stunned at the same time, cracked open like an egg, just by the pressure of Sam's mouth on his. Even as his skin's crawling with shame, Sam feels a terrible, ugly pride about that: only he can do this to Dean, this is only his, the deepest levels of Dean, only his. 

_Mine_ , Sam thinks, and has to fold his hands tightly into his armpits to keep from reaching for Dean again. 

He doesn't expect the speed with which Dean lunges for him, grabbing and twisting his arm, manhandling him around until he's facing the mirror, Dean plastered against his back. 

"Dean, what—" Sam's words scale up into a yelp as Dean's hand snakes around, arrowing roughly into Sam's jeans and taking hold of his cock through the aggravatingly thick layers of his boxers. 

"Quiet, quiet, fucking, _quiet_!" Dean growls, hot gust behind Sam's ear that spreads goosebumps in its wake like a plague. His other hand snaps over Sam's mouth and Sam moans, muffled and desperate against warm, salty fingers, his dick surging into Dean's firm grip. "Talk too goddamn much."

The friction of the shorts' cotton as Dean strokes him is brutal, as is the cramping lack of space in his jeans. Sam doesn't think he's ever been so fumblingly graceless, ripping the tongue of his belt free, struggling with the suddenly stupidly complicated button and zipper on his jeans. The denim finally opens up like a gasp, baggy enough to fall down his thighs and shackle his ankles. Not that Sam's going anywhere. 

"Good," Dean says, that same dangerous, toe-curling mutter, "that's my good boy."

Sam's shaking, hips making tiny thrusts that's all he's allowed, pinned between his brother and the implacable surface of the vanity. 

"It's okay." Dean nuzzles the back of Sam's neck, brief, sharp clasp of teeth, like a cat latching on. "Don't need to fight it. Just let it happen, Sam." Then, softer: "Baby."

Sam lets out a sob. Even odds whether it's the intensity of the hand-job or just this, Dean loving him again, having him again, taking him. 

Wet curl of tongue around the outside of his ear, sweet suck on the lobe. "My baby. Always."

Sam's balls feel heavy, tight, telegraphing pulses of need into his gut, his dick. But he's not there, he can't quite get there, doesn't know how to let go and let it happen. His hands fall onto the faux marble countertop, digging lines into his palms with the edges. 

"Christ, Sam, you think I know what I'm doing?" Dean grinds, forehead and hips, into Sam, the hand that had been gagging Sam's mouth sliding down to clutch them closer, tighter. "I'm just doing what I always do…trying to make it all work."

Sam spreads his legs as far as the jeans will allow, leaning for Dean's cock to rut into the cleft of his ass. The denim of Dean's jeans is rough, unkind but Sam—and his dick—are all for that, pushing into it, shoving back for it.

"I just need you, Sammy." Dean's cheek rubs along Sam's scapula. "I need you, okay? I need you. Don't leave me again."

The effort not to cry out, as his orgasm rockets through him, makes Sam lightheaded, blood filling his mouth like his spunk filling his shorts. He bit his tongue. Sam spits gore then slithers around searching out and finding Dean's mouth, the sweet, limp kisses of coming down. Sam reaches and finds Dean still hard, raring to go with a jerking, eager twitch at the touch of Sam's hand. Dean hisses, as if even that slight brush hurts. 

"Let me," Sam asks, already twisting the button holding him back. He hopes it covers for the words he can't quite say yet, the promise he's afraid to make: _I'm not going anywhere._ "Please, let me?"

"Yeah," Dean agrees, rutting into Sam's touch. "Yeah, do it."

***

"No!" Miria shouts, throwing herself at Dean's leg. "I wanna go with you, Daddy! I wanna go with _you_!"

There are, Sam thinks, certain advantages to being three. 

Dean glances up at Sam and grimaces, a weird embarrassment that overtakes him sometimes. Not of his kids; Dean is proud as hell of his children, even at their tantrumy worst, but sometimes he seems strangely ashamed of _being_ a father, as if Sam caught him doing something he has no right to. 

"Miri," Dean says, prying her loose, despite Miria's every effort. "I know you do, but you're going to hang out with Uncle Sammy instead."

"No," Miria insists, tearing up. "No, Daddy, no."

Trying to figure out the miracle of physics that will—theoretically—make the twins' car seats fit into skeletal frame of their stroller, Sam tries to convince himself that it's neither personal or about his babysitting skills, though he doesn't think he's any more persuaded than Miria, who's broken down into full-out sobs. 

Dean kneels down, taking Miria by her shoulders. "Look. Uncle Sammy's going to take you guys to the library. You _like_ the library."

Like a break in the storm, Miria lets up, sniffling. "Does Uncle Sammy know how to read?"

Dean chokes a little and glancing at him, Sam catches Dean looking back, the laugh he didn't let out glinting in his eyes. "Yeah, he reads okay."

"Like you?" Now Miria glances at him, and Sam doesn't think he's ever seen such a witheringly doubtful glance, even from his worst professors. Even from _Dad_. 

"Even _better_ than me!" Dean says, tickling her belly, and Mira giggles shying away.

"Nuh-uh," she says, loyally. 

"Uh-huh!" Dean says, tickling her again. Miria shrieks, laughing, and Sam shakes his head, amazed at how fast she's switched moods. Dean lifts her skyward in a rush, biting playfully at her belly.

"Does he know Harry Potter?"

"Not personally," Sam mutters, _finally_ getting one of the damn chairs to click into place. He just barely keeps himself from fist pumping, aware of Dean's gaze on him. Still, he feels a slight tick of surprise at the thought of Dean reading bedtime stories, let alone Harry Potter. 

"Dad, is Harry Potter real?"

"No, sweetie."

"He might be," Sam objects as he triumphantly clicks the second seat into place. He straightens up and grins smugly at Dean. 

Dean slants him a look. "Sam."

"You don't know! You didn't believe in vampires, once upon a time."

"That was _different_!"

Sam's grin gets wider and, seeing it, Dean pulls himself up short, scowling. "When you find a giant castle of wizards up on some foggy English mountain, we'll talk."

"So, you've read the books, then?"

"I have kids, Sam." Dean bristles, as affronted as if Sam questioned his knowledge of ghosts. 

"Dad does voices!" Miria chimes in staunchly.

"Aw, man…" Dean scuffs the sidewalk, pink blooming through his cheeks like a sunset.

"Can you do voices?" Miria asks, eyeballing same with that same depthless scorn. 

"Not as good as your Daddy," Sam says, with a glance under his lashes at Dean, "but I'll do my best."

***

The Medical Examiner's office is cold after the sunlight outside and the sharp reek of chemicals cut through the softer scents of formula and baby food on his skin and clothes.

"Oh, yes," the ME says, a no-nonsense and prematurely gray-haired woman named Viola Ahern. "A lot of families up in arms right now over their loved ones going missing. Me, I don't quite understand the attachment; once the person's gone, they're gone, but it's a disgusting business, even so."

Dean doesn't really know what to say to that. The years without Sam at his back haven't made him any better at making chit chat. Instead, he flips through the pages of the file Dr. Ahern shoved at him. "Are there any correlations between the…" He wobbles between _victims_ and _corpses_ , and finally comes down on the side of, "bodies? Age, race, ethnicity, anything like that?"

"Well, they were all freshly buried. Same day or day after burial." Ahern leans back in her chair, the squeak of it telling Dean how seldom she actually sits in it. "They were all dead less than a week. And they were all adults. That anti-vaxxer family from the North End buried their toddler on the same day that two other bodies were taken from Parkville Cemetery. The coffin was dug up, but not taken. I thought that was interesting, even if that dumb deputy, Barkley blew me off. But there haven't been any other child deaths to show if it was a fluke or an actual pattern."

"What do you think it is?"

Ahern shrugs. "I think it's weird," she says baldly. "But I also think that there's not enough information for me to draw any conclusions about it." She pushes back from her desk. "Now, would you like to see the body?"

"The body?" Dean repeats, puzzled.

Ahern's eyebrows lift with the widening of her eyes, an expression that reminds Dean oddly of his dad. "I thought that was why you're here. At the last grave, a body was found. A Jane Doe. Didn't they tell you this at the station?"

"Well," Dean stalls, "you know Bar…Barkley. He gave me the big picture, but he was skimpy on the details. That's why I'm here."

Ahern shakes her head and looks disgusted, but it's not aimed at him, which is all Dean needs as she gets to her feet. "Figures," she grumbles. "Well, come on back. I haven't started the autopsy yet. It got reprioritized after that big shoot-up on 19th. You can watch, if you want."

"Great!" Dean says brightly, though he's never liked the nuts and bolts of a person's insides like Sam does. He also wonders how long he can leave Sam in possession of all three kids before Sam goes _The Shining_ on everybody. 

It's not that Dean doesn't know the kids can be a handful. Even given Kait's generally easy-going nature—and Dean has no idea where that came from—two infants and a curious toddler are no joke. He just wishes Sam wouldn't act like his kids are freaking _radioactive_.

Dean follows Ahern into the autopsy lab. "So tell me about this body."

Ahern gestures carelessly. "Like I said, Jane Doe, found next to most recent grave. Black, five-ten, hundred and eighty pounds. Body didn't belong to any of the desecrated graves. There was enough evidence to assume she was murdered there."

It's not a big room, but it's excruciatingly clean, the smell of chemicals practically crisping the hair in Dean's nose. Six morgue drawers; Ahern goes to the second set and pulls out the bottom drawer. 

Something had been gnawing at the back of Dean's neck since about ten minutes after Sam jerked him off in the motel bathroom. He'd joked to himself that it was some kind of sexually-transmitted paranoia, but as Ahern talks, as he gets a good look at the brutalized, mangled body on the drawer tray, as bile burns backward up his esophagus, he feels more and more distant from himself, wrapped in a blizzard of foreboding. 

The face is clawed, maybe even chewed, Jesus, but it's unmistakably Tammy. 

Ahern is eyeballing him. "Do you know her?"

Dean shakes his head, the gesture as far away as jerking a kite on a string. Cool as Robert Plant, he says, "Never seen her before in my life."

***

"Dean—" Hurrying after Dean while pushing the stroller requires some coordination, which Sam finds out the hard way, but after straightening himself and the twins, he catches up with his brother. "I don't get why you're in such a hurry!" He grabs Dean by the sleeve.

It hasn't been long enough that Sam should feel hurt when Dean snatches away from him, hard. Sam's an idiot; it hurts anyway, a sharp, breathless knife stab that makes Sam stumble again and drag to a stop. 

Guilt crosses Dean's face as he, too, halts. That's something. Sam clutches it close to quiet the sudden, reflexive hummingbird of panic in his chest. _It doesn't mean anything. It's not over. You're overthinking it. Stop. It's not over._

"His mother is…" Dean's gaze slants sideways at Miria, watching and listening attentively. "Gone," Dean finishes. "Don't you think he should know that?"

Evan casually drops his stuffed bear over the edge of his seat, his face as innocent as if Sam hadn't been watching him think about it for the last three minutes. It's also not the first time, so Sam's ready for it, reaching and catching the silky toy and returning it to Evan, who looks at it goggle-eyed, like he's never seen it before. Sam sets a mental bet and timer as to how long before Evan tosses it again. 

Straightening, Sam says, "I think we don't know enough about what happened to go charging in there and tell a little boy that his mom is…" Sam glances at Miria. "Gone."

"Where did Mommy go, Daddy?" 

"Nowhere, Miri; Mom's waiting for us at home. We're talking about someone else's Mommy. She went on a trip."

"Like us? We're on a trip."

"Yeah. sweetheart," Dean nods. "Like us."

A sudden chill brushes down Sam's spine like a fingertip, spreading goosebumps in its wake. He knows Dean's just humoring Miria, but it prickles in the quiet, superstitious part of himself that sometimes still prays, or knocks on wood, or touches his kissed fingers to the Impala's roof on yellow lights. 

"Here, get down," Dean says, setting Miria back on the sidewalk. "Why don't you help Uncle Sammy push the stroller?"

Apparently, this is a truly exciting treat, because Miria's whole face lights up and she struts—God, she really is Dean's kid—over, ducking under Sam's arm to take a place in the middle of the handlebars. They're about level with her forehead, but she gives Sam and smugly proud look over her shoulder and grabs on. Penguin-walking to keep from stepping on her, Sam gently propels them all forward. Dean grins, managing to be both mocking and approving and Sam rolls his eyes, though it feels embarrassingly good, having Dean's approval for a change. 

It doesn't last long. 

"He's eight, Sam." Dean returns to the previous conversation with the same grimness of his determination to go back to Angela Edgelow's shop and tell Isaiah that Tammy's dead. "He doesn't care _why_. He'll just care that she _is_."

"Okay, well, _I_ care," Sam says, hitching his shoulders back to relieve the tense ache that won't seem to go away. "I think we should know more. Something weird's going on here. My vision, dug up dead bodies, whatever it is that killed Tammy… We don't know enough. We don't know anything. It's dangerous for us to go charging in."

"We're not charging into anything," Dean scoffs. "We're just going to tell Isaiah what happened to his mom. Then we can figure out the rest."

"Why are you so stuck on this?"

"Because no one should have to wonder, Sam. Don't you remember what it was like, when it was us, when Dad would just disappear? Hell, that's how you got pulled back into all this in the first place." Dean stops again, throwing up his hands. "What if it was me?"

"Don't," Sam warns.

Dean's jaw flexes, but he doesn't push it. "Someone needs to tell that boy," he says flatly. "We're going."

He strides off, fast and stiff, leaving Sam to follow at Miria's careful, short-legged pace. "Okay," he agrees, with a helpless shrug, the knot in his shoulders getting tighter. "I guess we're going."

***

"Isaiah is napping," Angela crosses her arms tight under her breasts, the expression on her face just as tight. "I don't think he should be disturbed for this."

Even though he'd been arguing with Dean about this a few minutes ago, Sam steps in. "His mother is _gone_! I think that qualifies for waking him up a little early."

"I don't know why you all think you should be the ones to tell him about his mother in the first place," Angela says, straightening to her full, insignificant, height. "You don't know him. You aren't _family_."

"Lady, we're the kind of family you don't know anything about," Dean says, the low, dangerous voice that gives Sam's nuts a tingle. 

"The kind that got his mother killed in the first place?" Angela asks, the slight accent in her voice thickening with her anger. She glances at Sam. "Haven't the two of you done enough?"

Miria yanks on the tail of Sam's shirt. "Uncle Sammy," she asks uncertainly, when Sam looks down at her, "we didn't kill anybody, did we?"

"No." Something about the look on her face makes Sam reach for her. She comes into his arm with a fierce kick-off that almost overbalances them both, but Sam uses the kinetic energy to hoist her up, high on his hip, where she clings tight. Sam brushes her hair back from her forehead. "We didn't kill anybody."

Miria frowns and, God help him, Sam knows that expression all too well. He's seen it in mirrors and pictures his whole life. "Why is that lady saying we did?"

"She's just mad," Sam explains. "Sometimes people say things they don't mean, when they're angry."

"They _lie_?"

Sam bites the inside of his lip until he tastes blood. Even he's not so cruel as to laugh in the face of a three-year old. 

"It's bad to tell a lie. Daddy smacks my butt when I tell a lie," Miria confides, her face very serious. "Is he going to spank that lady?"

Sam chokes. He can't help it. In the stroller, Kait makes a similar noise and then starts crying. Which sets Evan off. The brief, but shining spark in Sam that he might be getting the hang of this dissolves into twitchy panic and the desire to run. "Uh. Dean—" He glances at his brother. 

"Take 'em outside, Sam." Dean says, his shoulders rounded and tight. He doesn't turn to return Sam's gaze. "Kait needs to be changed and Evan's either hungry or crying to be crying. Either way, can you just take care of them for five minutes, while I deal with this?"

Dean's tone is crystal clear on his conviction that Sam can do no such thing and—as much as it pisses him off and hardens his resolve—Sam can't realistically disagree. It doesn't stop him from sniping back just as pissy, though: "Yeah, Dean. I can take care of _your kids_ , no problem. We'll all just be in the car, waiting for Daddy."

His exit is pretty much ruined by the toddler on his hip and his awkward, one-handed handling of the stroller out the door, but he's pretty sure Dean damn well gets his point.

***

Into the quiet that returns to the shop afterward, Edgelow's voice is darkly smug: "Why should I let you anywhere near Isaiah when I see how you treat your own children—and your brother—shoving them out of sight when they're inconvenient?" She uncrosses her arms, planting her hands on her thin, flat hips instead. "Is that 'family' to you?"

Strangely, now that Sam and the kids are out of the way, Dean feels less edgy, less like he's had too much tar-black trucker coffee on an empty stomach. He's been hunting alone for years now, and his muscle memory is excellent. It lets him say—with just that little extra kick—politely, "Ma'am, you don't know a damn thing about me. And you don't know shit about being a hunter's kid." Dean jerks his chin toward the back of the store. "Now, you can go wake that kid up, or I can. But I can guarantee you, I'm going to talk to Isaiah before leaving this store."

Edgelow draws herself up, mouth opening as if to speak, but Dean beats her to it: "And I don't think either one of us wants the cops showing up, since, with no legal guardian, they'll dump Isaiah straight into Child Services." 

It's a threat that had been thrown at him and Sam more than once when they'd been kids—sometimes by their own dad—but Dean doesn't feel a speck of guilt about using it now. Edgelow is fair game. 

Edgelow's eyes narrow and she gives him a good, long look as if measuring whether Dean's got the balls to do it. But there are ways to get kids like Isaiah out of foster care and into good homes. More and more, Dean's not liking the idea of leaving Isaiah here. Edgelow's too possessive, already acting like Isaiah's hers. 

Belatedly, he remembers the memorial card shoved in Tammy's mirror for Edgelow's son. It wouldn't be too hard for a grieving mother to get her wires crossed, he guesses, want a son to replace the one she lost. Though Dean can't imagine anything being able to replace his kids, if something happened to them. Just like there'd been a Sam-shaped hole in his life that nothing had filled until Sam came back to him. 

Some things have no substitute. 

"Look, I don't want to cause trouble," Dean says, softening. "Just let me talk to Isaiah. We can do it together, if that makes you feel better."

"Fine," Edgelow says, still giving him the sour cat-eye. "But I don't want you in my home. You wait here, I will bring him down."

She flips the sign card on the door over to closed and then stalks off into the curtained rear of the shop. Somewhere in the back, Dean hears another door open, and then close. Taking his time about it, Dean idles his way to the back of the store, also, not wanting some dingbat tourist or wannabe wizard knocking on the door and expecting to be served while Dean's trying to give Isaiah the worst news of his life. 

The billowing curtains give way to the expected fortunetelling table and chairs. Another set of drapery blocks off the alcove from the shop's rear. It's a lot colder back here. Not so much that he fears ghosts, but definitely as though the air conditioning is turned up way high. There's also a _smell_. Faint, beneath the much stronger musk of incense, but persistent, musty and rotten, like a mouse died behind one of the heavy many-drawered armoires that line either wall. 

He hears the heavy clomp of Edgelow's feet on the boards overhead and then coming down the stairs. The smell gets stronger when she pushes the back draperies aside to usher Isaiah in and Dean gets a brief glimpse of a dozen or more air fresheners scattered over every surface. 

Looking at Isaiah, Dean can believe he was napping; the kid still looks half-asleep, his lids hanging low and shuffling along as though he'd bang into the furniture without Edgelow's steady hand guiding him to the nearest chair. Dean's only seen Isaiah a couple times and the last time was a couple years ago, but the boy in Dean's memory was quick and curious, reminding Dean—painfully—of Sam. Is this what Tammy's frequent absences have done to her son? 

_It's different. I have Sam and, God help me, Lena. They're not left alone, with strangers. They have people, a family. It's not the same._

He's not so sure he buys it. 

Edgelow glares at him: _You see?_

Dean squats in front of Isaiah, the tendons in his knees popping in a way that leaves him momentarily breathless. Isaiah looks at Dean dully, no recognition on his face. 

"Do you remember me?" Dean says, because he doesn't quite know where to start, now that he's actually got Isaiah in front of him. "I'm Dean Winchester, I knew your mom."

A slight light goes on in Isaiah's eyes, his head lifts. "Knew?"

"Yeah." Dean nods, knocking his knuckles together between his spread knees. "You know what your mom did; she helped people, she saved lives."

Edgelow makes a quiet, contemptuous noise from behind Isaiah. Dean lifts his head and looks at her, a warning in his eyes. She crosses her arms and looks away. 

"Your mom, she died fighting the good fight. She died a hero and it's okay to be sad about it, but you should also be proud." He touches Isaiah's knee. "Your mom did good things, important things. You should remember that, always."

Isaiah nods slowly, but other than that, he doesn't seem to react. Dean isn't entirely sure the kid heard him. Or maybe it's shock. Sam's always been better at this stuff than he is. 

He reaches into his back pocket and tugs out his wallet, fishing out an old and yellowed, soft-edged card. "Your mom, she had friends, too. See, all of us, all her friends, we're also like a family. And you're part of it. So if you're ever in trouble, if you ever need something, if you need a place to go, you just call this number, and I'll come." He hands it to Isaiah, who holds it in a loose, soft, can't-even-be-called-a grip.

Edgelow steps forward, putting a hand on Isaiah's shoulder. "What do we say, Isaiah?"

"Thank you," Isaiah says, in the same dutifully rote tone that Miria uses when he prods her. 

"Is there anything else?" Edgelow asks pointedly, eyeballing Dean like a cockroach she wants to smash. 

"No, I guess not," Dean says, standing up—with another sharp crack of tendons—and wiping his sweaty hands down the sides of his legs. It still feels unfinished somehow, unsatisfying, but he guesses it's not about what he feels. He looks at Isaiah again. "You take care, kid," he says, studying the boy's dark, expressionless face. It's all too easy to remember how it was when his mom died. Not the blur of what happened for the next several months, but the _feeling_ of it, the dry hollowness of it, out of which he couldn't even bring tears. 

_(it was the same when Sam left him, Nothingness in the shape of Dean Winchester)_

He's trying to find the opening to the thick, shrouding curtains when Isaiah speaks up, bright and sudden, sounding more like the boy Dean knew: "Dean—?"

Dean turns back, the soft, billowing hangings clenched tight in his fist. "Yeah?"

Edgelow puts both hands on Isaiah's shoulders. "We don't want to take up too much of the man's time, Isaiah. He has his own children to get back to." Though her tone is mild, there's nothing but cast-iron bitch in the look she gives him. 

Isaiah sits back in the chair again, blinking hard. "Did…Did it hurt? When my mom died?"

The image of Tammy is vivid in his mind still; savaged and torn. "No, kid. It was quick, and she didn't suffer."

As a rule, he tries not to lie to children, but there are some truths they should never have to know.

***

"I can bench press three hundred pounds," Sam moans, falling straight back onto the motel's bed. Something under the bed cracks like a gunshot and—proving he understands nothing about children—Miria giggles. "Why is it that playing with a couple of kids for a couple of hours makes me feel like someone beat me with that three hundred pound barbell for at least that long?"

"Because you're a wuss, Sammy," Dean says cheerfully, before going back to blowing raspberries into Kait's stomach, to her shrieking delight. "Always have been, always will be." His voice and gaze softens, the transformation into Dad Dean, "Isn't he, Katie girl? Isn't he?"

Kait crows in unmistakable agreement, legs kicking with glee. Sam picks up the pillow and drops it over his face. Dean says something, though—not in Daddy Voice—and he lifts it off again. "What?"

"I'm worried about Isaiah," Dean repeats. He's been like this since they left the shop, hot and cold, all over the kids as though he's afraid they're going to be ripped right out of his arms. It's the first that he's mentioned what happened in the shop, though.

Sam sits up, biting back his wince as sore muscles protest. "How so?"

Dean hitches Kait onto his hip, giving an uncomfortable, one-shouldered shrug. "I don't trust Edgelow."

"Tammy trusted her," Sam points out. "Trusted her enough to leave her son with her when she went out of town." Sam raises his eye eyebrows. "Maybe we should trust her judgement."

Dean's mouth flattens, clearly dissatisfied with that answer. "Her son died," he says finally, after a glance to make sure Miria is fully engaged in the cartoon on the laptop. "It changes a person. It could've changed her."

"Maybe," Sam agrees. "But we don't know that. We don't know anything."

"Why are you fighting me on this?"

"I'm not fighting you!" Sam scoots to the bed's edge. Evan takes this as an invitation grab onto the leg of Sam's pants, struggling to pull himself up into a standing position. "I'm just saying: there's a lot we don't know. I don't think we should just jump to conclusions." Sam offers Evan his fingers; Evan grabs on strongly and pulls himself up straight, wobbly but surprisingly powerful. Dean's going to be in deep shit very soon, if the twins are about to start walking. Evan beams at Sam and Sam finds himself grinning back. 

When he glances up at his brother, though, the expression on Dean's face kills it. Sam doesn't even know what to call it, a hot-eyed and raw-faced pain that sinks deep into Sam's stomach and flutters. 

"I don't get you," Dean says, a bare and wiry grit of sound.

Sam frowns, glancing between Dean and Evan bouncing enthusiastically between his knees. "What?"

"Just…" Dean shakes his head, depositing Kait into the playpen. "You were the guy. The one who was always lecturing me on the right thing to do, about giving a damn. And now this kid, this kid who lost his mom, _just like us_ , is in trouble, and you can't even give a crap." Dean crosses his arms, his body sideways, his gaze sidelong, his voice dropping as he says, "Just like you can't seem to give a crap about your own nieces and nephew."

 _"What?"_ Sam straightens up. In the process, Evan loses his grip, falling down hard on his diapered ass. Sam sees Evan thinking about whether he wants to cry or not and he just cannot deal with another wailing baby today. He swoops the baby up and stands in a single gesture, lifting Evan like a rocket. Evan shrieks with delight.

Crisis averted, Sam tucks Evan into his elbow and looks back at Dean. "Dean, I care," he insists. "I care."

If anything, Dean's face crumples more, the nervous energy that's driven him all day bleeding out and leaving him smaller, tired. "Sam… Man, I don't even know what you care about anymore."

"What are you even talking about?" Sam goes over to the playpen and plops Evan next to his twin. "Where is this coming from?"

"Why did you quit your job?"

"Wh—" Sam can't even keep up with all the things they're apparently arguing about, the goalposts moving before he can even get his feet under him. "What does this have to do with anything?"

"I want to know." Dean comes closer, pushing into Sam's personal space. It's not sexual at all, but Sam's skin prickles with Dean's nearness anyway, a reflexive twitch of his dick in his pants. 

"I…I don' know." The initial thrill aside, Sam wants to move, to escape into the larger open space of the room, but Dean's got him pinned between himself and the playpen. 

"Bullshit."

"I don't know!" It's the truth, but it hurts like fuck to say it, wrenching it up from some thinly scabbed and unhealed place where he was hoping he wouldn't have to look or talk about it again. Sam's chest hitches and he realizes he's _really_ close to crying and that just can't happen. He shoulders past Dean, except there's nowhere to go in this tiny, stagnant motel room. It's an old and familiar feeling, one he hasn't missed at all. 

"I'm going out," he mumbles, without a pause in his straight line to the door.

***

Dean was tired enough—and pissed enough—that he wasn't going to wait up for Sam, but after years on the road, he can't sleep through a door opening. He lifts his head from the pillow, his fingers underneath searching out the grip and trigger of his gun. But it's Sam.

Dean falls back. 

"You know, it's pretty hard to get drunk if you're broke," Sam says. He's not slurring and, when Dean looks through his lashes, Sam is steady as he balances on one leg and then the other, removing his boots. "Hard, but not impossible."

Dean can't help it; he scoffs.

"The beer tastes like piss, though." Sam grins, brilliant, happy. It's so rare he looks like that, anymore. It aches in Dean's chest, like the throb of overused muscles. 

Sam shucks his jeans and then curls in behind him, fitting into Dean as he always has. Dean's tired enough that the thought chokes him and he turns his face into the pillow, his eyes hot as his closed up throat. It's not fair. It's just…not fair

He's never spent much time dwelling on fair, because God knows the lesson of the unfairness of the universe started early with his mother and runs right on through Tammy Greer and her son. Even now it cuts him deep sometimes, though; the depths to which the injustice of the universe can go and how far the Powers that Be go to remind them of that fact. 

It's unfair that Sam should feel this good, this familiar against him, soothing and satisfying in a way that his wife is not, has never been. It is unfair to have this specter of _wife_ hanging over him, however much she was the first to leave their vows in rags not even fit for cleaning. It's unfair that his children are sleeping not four feet away and because of them, he has to choose. He will have to choose for the rest of his life.

"Shhh." It's barely an exhalation against the back of his ear. Sam's hand creeps under Dean's tee, circling over his stomach, his chest, flicking his nipples to shivering life before dipping low, inching under the elastic band of his shorts and into the thicker hair of his groin.

Dean stiffens, turns his head to protest, but Sam doesn't-whispers, "Shhhh" again against his skin, long fingers cupping carefully around Dean. Not sexual, exactly. Dean doesn't know how to describe it. He doesn't have words for something like this. Nothing descriptive, anyway. There's just breath and them and him, held in Sam's warm, still hand. "Like this," Sam says, shifting behind Dean until his own cock is against the cleft of Dean's ass. "It's okay. Just…like this."

Dean closes his eyes. They have so little time like this. And it's never enough. So Dean is tempted to just stay like this, let himself drift off and deal with everything else in the morning. And Dean's not a saint; he gives himself a while to lie, to enjoy it, to pretend there's nothing else to do or think about. 

What else he's not, though, is a let-go-and-relax guy. Opening his eyes, Dean says, "I think we've been going at this the wrong way."

"Mmm?" Sam jerks against Dean's back. He, at least, had been drowsing. "You wanna be the big spoon?" he mumbles, beery and hot against Dean's neck.

Dean huffs, rolling his gaze toward the water-stained ceiling. "Not what I'm talking about, drunk-ass."

Sam turns his face into the pillow and groans. "Can't we just sleep?" he asks. "It's late, I've been drinking, we're both tired," Sam's voice drops, "and I've got your dick in my hand. That says 'call it a night', to me."

Dean gives his hips a wiggle to dislodge Sam's fingers, so he can roll on his back and look Sam in the face. "Tammy was already out of town. She'd been gone hunting for a couple weeks already. She never made it home, all her stuff was still gone. So if she'd just come in from out of town…what would she have done first?"

"I don't kno…" Sam starts, but then the light in his eyes boots back up, the problem-solver, and he says, "She'd go and get her kid. She'd go pick up Isaiah."

"But that's not what Edgelow said."

"So she lied." Sam's face hardens, though his hand doesn't move from where it's spread over Dean's belly. It reminds him of the way he used to touch Lena when she was pregnant, a comparison that makes Dean squirmy in a way he can't define. 

He jerks his mind back to the problem at hand. He needs to focus. 

"Okay, wait, though. If Ang—if Edgelow is the one who killed Tammy, how did she do it? I saw the pictures you brought back. Tammy was mauled. _Seriously_ mauled. And Edgelow's tiny. How does a woman that small not only overpower a hunter, but tear her up that bad?"

"That's where I spun out, too. But she did it, man, I know she did."

"Yeah," Sam agrees, pinch mouthed as if it hurts him to say it. He hates to be wrong. "Okay. But it's still the middle of the night. The kids are asleep. Edgelow doesn't know we're onto her…it can wait until morning."

It itches Dean to just leave it, even the handful of hours between them and morning. But Sam's right. Just the thought of rousing the kids makes his bones ache. But Isaiah…

"She hasn't hurt Isaiah so far," Sam murmurs, reading Dean's unwillingness with his usual skill, tipping his head in to touch Dean's. "If she's really using him as a surrogate for her son, she won't. He'll be okay, too. And then we'll get her."

Dean doesn't like it, but he nods, shifting his gaze back to the brownish constellation of ceiling stains.. Sam's right. Of course he's right. Dean lets a long, slow breath out and tries to relax, get back to that sweet spot he'd been in before he started this conversation. 

"I quit my job because I realized I was wrong," Sam whispers. Dean starts to turn his head, but Sam stops him. "No," Sam says. "Don't look. Okay? Just listen."

Dean nods. 

"I was wrong," Sam says again. "About everything. I made us change our whole lives and then when I got what I want, I realized I didn't want any of it. I'd given up everything good in my life for some shit I didn't even want."

"What do you want?" Dean's probably supposed to stay silent, too, but he can't help it, the question springing out of him. 

The bedsprings creak as Sam scoots closer, one long leg creeping over to tangle with Dean's. "You, moron. I want you."

***

The sound of crying, the sound of _Evan_ crying, jerks Sam out of a dreamless sleep. He snorts and inhales sharply, eyes opening and his body popping up on one elbow before he's even entirely awake.

The hotel room is silent. The contrast of deep quiet slaps across his ears like he's suddenly gone deaf. Confused, he looks at Dean, next to him. Curled up—and hogging most of the bed, Sam notes—Dean snores under his breath, undisturbed. Nothing's happening. Sam blinks, puzzled. 

A second later, he hears a noisy, uneven hitch of breath from the playpen and then Evan _is_ crying, scratchy, tired and irritable. Dean twitches and Sam can almost feel him reinhabit his skin. "Sammy?" Dean slurs, disoriented and thick. Sam doesn't know how he knows Dean means the baby, but he kicks the blanket back with one leg and presses Dean back down into the mattress again. 

"It's okay," he says softly. "I got him, Dean." The tension goes out of Dean's body and he nods, already most of the way back to sleep. It aches to the bone—that Dean trusts him that much, that Dean's that exhausted. Sam crawls out of the bed and goes to the playpen to lift Evan up into his arms. 

Evan's resistant, his small body squirming and stiff. Tiny fists beat ineffectually against Sam's shoulder as he tucks Evan into the curve of his arm. "Sorry, kid," he whispers, fishing in the fridge for one of the bottles of formula. "You're stuck with me tonight." He bounces Evan gently, his thumb making circles on the baby's back. Evan sobs into Sam's shoulder, now clutching—and slobbering—for all he's worth. His nails bite sharply on naked skin and Sam wishes he'd thought to put a tee-shirt on first. 

"Uncle Sammy?" 

He turns at the sound of Miria's voice and sees she's sitting up, one hand scrubbing sleepily across her face in a gesture that's so exactly Dean it takes his breath away for a second. 

"Shhh," he says, jiggling with the still crying Evan across to her. He tries to tip Evan around so he can guide the nipple into the baby's mouth, but Evan's not having it, turning his face harder against Sam's shoulder and shivering with the force of his wails. "Your Dad's still asleep." 

Three years and it still just feels bizarre to call Dean someone's Dad. He settles on the edge of her bed and reaches to push her sleep tousled hair back from her chubby face. "Did Evan wake you up too?" He bounces Evan again half-heartedly but he's really resigned to another round of The Miria Incident until Dean finally wakes up because he can't take it anymore. 

Miria shakes her head and—for no reason he can tell, because the room's almost swelteringly hot—Sam feels cold. "Had a bad dream," she admits in a low voice and her breath hitches a little like she might start crying too. Sam feels a little panicky at the thought and switches Evan to his left arm— _still_ crying—and holds his arm out to her. Miria scoots across the bed like she was just waiting for permission, huddling up against his side and Sam doesn't think he's ever felt quite so huge or clumsy in his life. 

"What did you dream?" he whispers. The wind outside rises for a moment, flicking dirt against the windows and Sam startles a little. Miria shakes her head. 

On the bed, he hears Kait suddenly stir, sigh and whimper. _Oh man, not you too_ , he thinks and the thing is, he is slightly—okay, maybe a little more than slightly—freaked out by the prospect of all three kids cranky and inconsolable and in his care but as he looks across at Kait and sees her eyes are open, her chubby limbs flailing in agitation, his vague sense of uneasiness starts to deepen into actual fear. Evan finally stops the full bore cries, lapsing into fretful whimpers. 

"Miria, honey…" --And it's hard to keep it out of his voice so that the kids don't tweak any more than they already are, to sound calm and matter of fact— "I need you to get up, okay? We're going to get up and we're going to play a game." 

"Dad gets mad if we play games when we're s'posed to be sleeping," Miria informs him, looking up from the shelter of his arm. 

"I know, but Dad's going to play this game too. It's all right, I promise." Sam edges away from her and she slides off the bed. God, she's small. They're all so tiny. With a jolt, he realizes that Miria's only a few months younger and the twins only a few weeks older than he and Dean when the demon came for him. 

Sam's so cold his fingers feel almost numb as he ushers Mira around the foot of the bed. "I want you to pick up Kait and then you, her and Evan are going to hide in the closet, okay?" 

"Like hide and go seek?" 

"Yeah, like hide and go seek." Sam kicks Dean, not hard, in the shin. "Dean. _Dean._ Wake up." Sam tugs all the bedding off Miria's bed with his free arm and layers it in the closet floor for Miria to deposit Kait. He gives her Evan then, too, and she looks up with him with dark, trusting eyes. 

"Uncle Sammy?" 

"Yeah?" 

"This isn't a game, is it?" 

Sam sighs. "No, honey, it isn't. Can you watch your brother and sister for me? Stay in the closet until me or your Dad tell you it's okay to come out, no matter what you hear?" 

Miria nods. 

"Good girl. I'm going to close the door now." 

"Uncle Sammy? I'm scared." 

Sam bends and kisses her forehead. "I know, honey. It's okay to be scared. But you still need to stay here. You know me and your Dad will never let anything bad happen to you, right?" 

Miria nods. 

"I'll protect you," Sam promises, and it jolts through him, how much he means it, how strong it surges through him: _keep them safe._ Dean's kids. Sam's family. "I will _always_ protect you, okay? Nothing is going to hurt you." 

"What's up?" Dean is dressed already, tucking his handgun into the back of his jeans. Even though he was dead to the world just a minute ago, he looks alert now, ready. 

"Just wait," Sam says to Miria, giving her a brave grin that he doesn't feel at all. "It won't be long." 

"Promise?" Miria asks, her voice shaking. 

"Promise," Dean says firmly, from behind Sam's shoulder. 

"Promise." Sam makes a cross over his heart. 

Once Sam's closed the door and turned away from the closet, Dean asks again, quieter, "What's up?" 

Again the wind gusts against the windows, whistling in the ducts and the gaps around the frame. It's such a familiar sound, one Sam's listened to in hundreds of different motels, practically a lullaby. This time, though, Sam's skin is crawling, like that time he woke up to find a scorpion skittering up his bare belly. 

"I don't know," he says, flexing his shoulders, trying to throw the feeling off. "Something." His jeans and shirt are in a pile just inside the door. Sam starts getting dressed. 

"Something," Dean repeats. "Please tell me you didn't just wake up and shove my kids into a closet because you have the heebs." 

"Dean—" They don't have time for an argument. Sam doesn't know how he knows it, but he does. "The kids were awake. They feel it too." 

His gun is on the dinette table; Sam grabs it, shoves his feet into his boots. The feel of them on his bare feet draws his attention to how close they are to falling apart, the naked steel of the toes rubbing cold, but he doesn't think he has enough time for socks, especially as he twitches the curtain back. 

He has just enough time to take in the crowd of dark shapes with Jack-O-Lantern golden eyes around the doorway before one of them strikes the door with both fists. The power is incredible; the door jerks out of the frame and the top hinge blows loose. It falls inward into the room, held precariously by the bent bottom hinge. Sam backpedals frantically to avoid getting brained by it. 

_I'll huff and I'll puff…_ Sam thinks crazily. 

In the closet, Miria screams, high, shrill and terrified. On the verge of losing his gun from his surprised, nerveless fingers, the reminder— _keep them safe_ —firms Sam's grip and his brain. 

He brings the Smith & Wesson up, muscle memory and a lucid but rank fear— _can't screw this up, they're depending on you_ —flushing through him as he fires. 

The thing in the doorway, the thing that punched the door down, is dead. It had been a man—a big man—once, but not anymore, slip-rotting flesh and glowing orange eyes. The hot cordite stink of the guns covers any odor of decay. Squinting against the frenetic lightning flash of his and Dean's muzzle-flare, Sam hits the shoulder, corrects; his next is a head shot—not his best, but—the dead thing goes down. 

"Head shot!" Sam calls briefly. On the other side of the room, Dean grunts agreement. They're all crowded together, pushing in the door, making it easier to hit at least one no matter how crappy the shot. A cluster from both of them and, even in the shitty lighting, a handful go down, teeth gnashing at nothing. 

Doesn't matter, still more are coming. Sam falls back another step, tallying shots in his head, comparing them to the number of shapes still forcing through the door. 

_How many of them are there?_ He tries to remember how many bodies had been dug up from the local graveyards, but he can't focus enough to visualize the files, too many numbers already swirling in his head. 

The window shatters right next to him. Reaching, cold hands graze Sam's shoulder, fumble wetly at his forearm, his bicep. Like the door-breaker, their strength is crushing, terrible, far beyond what they had in life. "Dean!" 

One of the zombies gets hold of Sam's wrist, dragging at him, wrenching, squeezing until the gun drops from his numb fingers. He's not sure Dean can hear him over the report of his own gun; the Desert Eagle is like a cannon in these close quarters. _"Dean!"_

A second hand gets a grip on his shirt and they start reeling him back to the window. To their gross, broken-toothed mouths. Shattered glass lines the frame's bottom edge; the zombies' rotting skin peels off against its sharp edges in shreds. Sam definitely doesn't want to touch it or have his arm gashed into it. He tries to plant his foot against the wall, the worn down sole streaking against the ancient faux-wood paneling. 

_Please,_ Sam thinks, leaning as far sideways as he can without giving up any ground, groping for the nine on the glass spattered carpet. Little brittle stars bite into his fingertips, drawing blood. _I will take yoga, I will become a fucking master **yogi** if you just let me bend a **little further** , fuck…_

All at once, Dean's there at his side, grabbing the back of Sam's shirt and hauling in the opposite direction, shooting alternately at the zombies still pouring in the door and those crawling in the window. 

Sam abandons his reach for the gun, twisting to try and kick at the undead hands still holding him, feeling a lot like a rope in a tug of war. The struggle is too much for his old tee-shirt; the neckline and the part fisted up in Dean's hand parts ways with the rest of the worn-down cotton. The sudden slack makes Dean fall back and Sam lose what traction he had, the loop of neckband pulling tight around Sam's throat, choking him. 

It only lasts a second; Dean loses his grip and hits the floor, letting air flood back into Sam's heaving lungs. There's no time to enjoy it, though; though he kicked loose from some of the hands on him, the one on his wrist is tight as ever. 

Off to his left, a sharp _skree_ of metal—and another piercing scream from Miria. The closet. Somewhere behind him, Dean yells, stifled and hurried, desperate: "Sam!" 

The coldness in Sam finally pierces through to the marrow and everything gets really clear. 

The thick snap of the bones in his wrist doesn't even hurt. He knows it will, but right now, it's just something that has to happen. The dead aren't fast and they don't have the reflexes of the living. Sam twists, the zombie's fingernails gouge his skin, but he's free. 

One of the zombies buckled in the closet door, but the space is too narrow for it to fall all the way in, propped crookedly on the back wall. The zombie tears at it stupidly, clumsily, but it's only a matter of seconds before it either buckles onto the children, or the zombie thinks to grab for them. 

Sam grabs the zombie with his working hand, pulling and then shoving it away from the closet with all his strength, putting himself between it and the children. That's pretty much where his plans run out, weaponless and one handed, but he knows—no matter how this goes down—nothing is getting between him and these kids. 

"SAM!" 

He looks up in time to field the shape flying at his face, his hand recognizing it before his brain does. Plucking the gun out of the air and sending secret, silent prayers of thanks to his dad for being such a paranoid asshole who made them practice shooting with both hands, Sam brings the Desert Eagle up, balancing it on his broken wrist and blows a hole right through the zombie's brainpan. 

***

"Losing your touch," Dean says, even though the last thing he feels like is making jokes. "Getting slow."

"Yeah, well, the last time I did this, it didn't include a playpen, stroller and about three million bags of toys," Sam says back, the same kind of tight, second-nature humor. "Also, my wrist is broken."

Dean had done a quick and dirty reduction, duct-taped it to a broken-off piece of one of the dinette's chairs, but it's bruising up, must hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. "I'll fix you up once we're clear."

Sam looks at him, solid and clear. "I know."

Dean can't bear up against that unwavering look. For the hundredth time, he glances at the car, making sure the kids are still safe inside the Impala. "Got everything?"

"Almost." It's a shitty neighborhood, but the cops will be here soon and they both know it. "One more." 

Sam goes back into the room and Dean takes a second to wrap his fingers around the trunk's edge, breath and hands about equally shaky. 

Something moves at the edge of Dean's vision. Already on high alert, Dean moves too, whipping a survival knife from the trunk lid and turning to meet the suddenly screaming threat. Sharp fingernails claw at Dean's face, his neck, as the serrated blade sinks deep into Angela Edgelow's belly. 

She looks at him, shocked, furious, shrieks choking off in her throat. Dean's glance darts sideways, making sure Miria hasn't somehow wrestled free of her car seat. Then he takes a deep breath and angles the blade up, under the hard reef of the ribs. "Not my kids." Dean looks her in her fading, bulging eyes. "Not my brother. Not my family."

"Dean!"

Edgelow's body gets heavy as she leaves her flesh, sliding back off the blade. She falls to the concrete, lifeless, graceless.

 _"Dean!"_ Sam twists Dean around, hands tilting Dean's face to the light, pulling at his clothes. 

"I'm fine," Dean says calmly and never mind he's doused in blood. A firefly flash at the edge of his vision catches his eyes and he turns again, ready.

But the thing standing in the deepest shadow under the motel's eave doesn't make a move to attack them. The raging fire of adrenaline roaring through Dean's system snaps out and is replaced by a bitter cold understanding of what this was all about and why as he recognizes the small, decaying shape with its haunted lantern eyes. He's seen that face before.

It's Khalil. 

Angela's dead son. 

"Khalil?" Dean asks, softly, taking a knee. "Are you still in there?"

Solemnly, the little boy nods, another piece of flesh falling from his rotting face with the motion. Then, as Dean watches, the orange glow fades, and Khalil's body plummets to the pavement to join his mother.

***

"How's that?" Dean asks.

Sam flexes his wrist without actually flexing it. Even after years of makeshift medical care, he's pretty damn impressed at the cast Dean rigged up with some medical gauze, duct tape and an old ruler. "Yeah, I'm good."

Other than his jury-rigged cast, Sam's not so sure, but with Miri glued against his side like a Siamese twin, it seems inappropriate to say so, even if they were a 'talking about our feelings' family. 

He would've thought that Miria would be all over Dean, but she wrestled away from her father to stick with Sam instead, refusing to be budged. Sam's not quite sure what to do with that. He's sure it won't last. He glances down at the top of her head. It's not terrible, though.

The police will have their hands full at the motel and Sam had the presence of mind to grab Angela's purse—seemed only fair, since she'd done the same to Tammy—so they'll hopefully have a while before anyone figures out to come look for them at Angela's shop. 

Sam feels like he needs a while.

They'd found Isaiah locked in the apartment's pantry, far more lucid than when Edgelow paraded him before Dean and rightfully scared shitless. The handful of Angela's notebooks they'd found outlined in meticulous detail her attempts—and failures—to find a spell that would put Khalil's spirit into a new body, bring her son back to life.

Three guesses whose body Edgelow had chosen. He wonders if Isaiah had known Edgelow's intentions, or whether she'd just kept him ignorant, docile. Among Edgelow's things, they'd also found a shitload of zolpidem—a sedative—and, at a guess, Edgelow hadn't been taking it herself. 

_Christ._

Edgelow might have had a point about hunters and their kids, given what Isaiah had been put through, what Miria, Evan and Kait had just seen. Hell, he and Dean are hardly the poster-children for normal, Sam thinks, as Dean runs a rough knuckle over Sam's cheek, disguising the caress behind smudging dirt away. 

_I fuck my brother,_ Sam tells himself, looking Dean in the eyes, owning it in a way he'd always been afraid to before. _And I love him. There's no one else for me. There never will be. It's always going to be him._

It's still scary, but not in a way he wants to run from. Sam doesn't know what his face looks like from the outside, but something about it makes Dean's eyes crinkle, a brightness in them Sam hasn't seen in years. For him. Just for him. 

Dean pats Sam's shoulder. "I'm gonna go shift stuff around in the car so Isaiah's got some room. Think you can keep an eye on the kids for a few minutes?"

Miria tucks in tighter against Sam's side, but Sam doesn't need the encouragement, nodding. "Yeah, I got it." He sees the doubt in Dean's face and waves him away. With his fucked up hand, which is a mistake, but he'll survive. "I got it, Dean."

Dean leaves, taking the silent Isaiah with him. Kait, always chill, is asleep in her chair, both hands tucked up around her ears as if she's sick and tired of all the noise. Evan is wide awake, but he's busily trying to chew apart the ring of plastic keys in his hands. Sam rocks the chair with the toe of his boot, feeling like he should do something.

An elbow in his side. Sam looks down and finds Miria staring up at him. "Yeah, Miri?" he asks quietly.

"Does…does it hurt, Uncle Sammy?" She looks troubled, but not scared, Dean's kid through and through.

Sam looks back down at his hand, the braided silver cast. Dean has the same arsenal of painkillers they always had, when they were hunting together, but Sam doesn't dare take any of them, not yet. Not until they're out of this fucking town. Maybe not until they get home. Dean says he's punishing himself. Sam not sure Dean's entirely wrong. "Yeah, it kinda does."

Miria's face gets very serious. It's another expression Sam knows from the mirror and it hurts way worse than the bone throb to see it, to know how close they all came. She takes his big hand in both her little ones. Her head dips and she brushes her lips across the skin, dry and somehow airy. "That's what Dad does when I have an owie," she explains. "Feel better?"

"Yeah." He smiles and holds out his arm. Miria climbs up to perch on his thigh. "Thanks, Miri."

She cuddles into his side, cranes up and kisses his cheek. "You're welcome, Uncle Sammy."

**Author's Note:**

> Many, many thanks to nilchance, beanside and girlguidejones for beta services. Deepest gratitude to nu_breed for inspiration and audiencing.


End file.
